“You’re not even a little intrigued?” Eli asked.
“Nope!”
“Just hold up a second,” Eli said. “I’ll message McKay.” He typed into his phone.
Marwan scrolled through headlines while he waited—only because he liked Mr. M, who’d actually turned him onto Disgraceland, a podcast about notorious rock and roll mysteries.
The top headline was another mass shooting.
California. White guy. Non-Muslim.
Always a relief.
Just last week, Marwan had relistened to a podcast about anti-Muslim crimes in the days after 9/11, and it made his stomach sour. His family wasn’t really religious—his sisters wouldn’t wear headscarves like Numdal did when they got older; his mother didn’t—but they were still culturally Muslim. So people made crazy assumptions about their worldview—or at least people like Christos did.
“This is weird,” Eli said. “The original message I got about the urgent matter is gone.”
Marwan opened the app; his message was gone, too. The girls also reached for their phones.
Eli’s phone dinged. He looked at it and said, “Mister M says there must be some mistake because he’s out sick today and didn’t send the message.”
“Ask him what the deal is with the device,” Marwan said.
“It just told us not to tell anyone about it,” Eli said.
“Are you for real?” Marwan asked.
Eli answered with a defiant look of amusement, but whatever, Marwan had places to be.
“Let’s just go,” Marwan said. “And if anybody asks, the whole urgent matter that’s clearly not urgent never happened.”
“Works for me,” Ilanka said, and walked out.
“But I just told Mr. M about the messages we got,” Eli said. “So he knows we were here.”
Marwan didn’t have time to care.
The device blinked urgently:
DO NOT TELL ANYONE ABOUT THE DEVICE.
DO NOT LEAVE THE DEVICE UNATTENDED.
Eden seemed mesmerized, like if you waved a hand in front of her face, she might not even blink. Marwan was tempted to try it.
“So what should we do?” she said to no one in particular.
A shrieking alarm woke violent vibrations in the instruments around them. Marwan’s hands went to his ears. At first he thought the device was doing it, but no, it was the fire alarm. “We need to go,” he said.
“I say we take it,” Eli said.
“I say we leave it,” Marwan said.
Eden looked at him with a sort of panic in her eyes. Then she looked back at the device … Marwan looked, too.
DO NOT LEAVE THE DEVICE UNATTENDED.
DO NOT LEAVE THE DEVICE UNATTENDED.
DO NOT LEAVE THE DEVICE UNATTENDED.
DO NOT LEAVE THE DEVICE UNATTENDED.
The cube went abruptly dark—Marwan had the strange sense that it was thinking—then lit up with rainbow swirls that quickly tightened into new words:
TAKE ME WITH YOU …
Followed by:
OR ELSE.
Eli was maybe about to reach for the device when Eden grabbed it, shoved it into her backpack, and headed for the door.
“Seriously?” Marwan shouted, following her down the hall, where even the air seemed to be screaming at them to get out. They went down three flights of dizzying stairs and out to the front of the building.
She crossed the street and he followed. Eli was with them when they stopped on the corner and turned toward the sirens; Ilanka was long gone.
A fire truck with a toy skull strapped to its front grill stopped in front of the school, and firefighters wearing their weight in gear leaped from it. The walkie-talkies on their belts crackled as they swarmed the building like alien invaders.
EDEN
Oh god, oh god, oh god. She really shouldn’t have taken it. Why did she take it?
“Now what?” Marwan said.
“I don’t know.” Eden’s heart was trying to burst its way out of her. Adrenaline was no joke. “Do you think it …?”
The timing was too perfect to be coincidence.
“Do I think it what?” Marwan seemed mad at her.
“Do you think it triggered the fire alarm?”
“What—no,” Marwan said, like it was ridiculous.
Maybe it was.
She hadn’t wanted to risk leaving it, though; couldn’t handle doing the wrong thing. The rules on the cube were clear, and she was the kind of person who followed the rules because bad things happened when you didn’t. She went to check her phone and felt a roller-coaster plunge of panic that she’d left it up there. But no, there it was, in her back right jeans pocket.
Eli said, “What’s it saying now?” He looked excited.
Eden peered into her backpack and reached for the device, then held it where only the three of them could see it. It was blank, lifeless.
She dropped it into her bag, zipped it, and checked her phone.
Her mom had texted to see if she was home yet.
Got stuck chatting, she wrote. Leaving now.
She really shouldn’t have taken it.
“Should I go back in?” she asked. “After the firefighters leave? And put it back?”
“What’s the fun in that?” Eli said.
“You think this is fun?”
He shrugged. “Sort of. I mean, I’d take it, but I have a dentist appointment and it seems like that might complicate things. I can take it later, though.”
“I’ve got soccer,” Marwan said. “And I’m already going to be late. I’m really sorry, but I’ve got to go. If it were me I’d put it back.”
He walked off toward a bike rack, and Eden felt disappointed in him for no reason, really. When he said he was sorry, at least he sounded like he meant it.
Putting it back was probably smart … and yet … that would mean it would be unattended.
Or else what?
Eli turned to her. “So what’s the plan?”
It was Wednesday, the one day of the week when Eden didn’t have theater or guitar lessons or therapy or anything that her mother made her do so she’d be too busy to be depressed or anxious or pregnant, even though she was two out of three of those most of the time.
The school security guards were out on the sidewalk shouting, “We need to clear the area. Please just go home! No one’s going back in today, so move on!”
“I guess I can take it and maybe just return it tomorrow?” She shrugged and tried to hide her panic. Deep breaths. Lots of them. Her heart would calm down eventually.
Right?
Right?
She checked her phone.
Starbucks was right there. Julian might still be inside, and she could say, “Hey, Gillian,” and be funny. All she needed was one actual real-life, broad daylight encounter to put an end to the awkwardness of what had happened.
“Let me give you my number.” Eli got his phone out. “I’m kind of, I don’t know, curious. This way you can let me know what else it does.”
“But what is it?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe some high-tech school project?”
It was a half-decent theory—a school project!—and made Eden a tiny bit less freaked out. Maybe it was like those doll babies that some schools used to make students scared of unprotected sex.
They exchanged numbers via texts, and Eli said, “Just be careful. About not talking about it or leaving it unattended and stuff.”
“What do you think would happen? Why did it say ‘or else’?”
“I don’t know,” he said then. “I mean, probably nothing will happen. But just let me know what it does next?”
She nodded.
Eli didn’t know that Eden was always careful. Especially at corners, where cars ran red lights more often than they stopped. Add in deliverymen who raced down the sidewalks on electric bikes, the people holding lattes on rented Citi Bikes who went the wrong way down streets, and idiot kids—even idiot
adults—on scooters, and there was the possibility of disaster around every corner.
She walked home under the elevated train that cut through Astoria. This was the subway line that delivered her mother to the publishing company in Manhattan where she was VP of marketing. Every time there was some horrible commute, which was at least several times a week lately (Eden always checked her Citizen app for subway accidents and bombs), her mom talked about packing up and selling their small, brick row house and moving to … well, that was the problem. Where would they even go? And wouldn’t it feel like leaving him?
Stopped at a light, on a piece of sidewalk where a long-ago girl named Natalie had written her name in wet cement and outlined it with a star, Eden plugged her ears as a train rattled overhead. When she was little and they’d be stopped like this, her mom would pretend to be talking to her, like miming a conversation. Sometimes they still did it, just to be silly, but it didn’t feel funny anymore because now there was too much between them that was unsaid, unheard—the air full of silent screams.
I miss him!
I’m angry!
I’m afraid all the time!
Once she turned off the train path, she put her earbuds in and queued up a playlist of her father’s called “Songs from Northern Britain.” She’d been working her way through all his lists and mostly liking them and also feeling bad about not being more open to his recommendations when he was alive.
Two jangly songs later, she was home. She punched the code on the downstairs door and went in and used the same code on the alarm keypad on the wall. The house was hot—summer just wouldn’t let go—so she walked in front of the thermostat to wake up the AC.
Upstairs in her room, she opened her backpack. Her water bottle had leaked and gotten the device wet—“Shoot”—so she took it out and dried it off with a hoodie.
The device blinked: Do not get the device wet.
She said, “Noted” aloud, and that felt weird.
She sat watching it for long enough that she felt foolish. Maybe that was literally it? The whole game or whatever? Just tricking someone into taking it home?
Eli would be disappointed.
She dug through her backpack again to see exactly how wet it had gotten in there. One of the colored dividers of her binder had bled blue onto some loose-leaf where she’d taken notes for her social studies essay, and this made her irrationally angry. She spread the papers out on her bed to dry, then woke up her laptop and started working on the essay, but who could concentrate, with that thing right there?
She checked her phone.
A fight up on Ditmars Boulevard; a purse snatching on Steinway Street.
She turned back to her laptop and opened the browser. She searched for “cube device” and “cube device with rules” but turned up nothing but the Amazon TV cube, and this wasn’t that.
She sat back in her chair. There were seams around some of the device’s edges but nothing that looked like an opening or a battery case.
She checked her phone.
Julian hadn’t posted anything since Starbucks.
She hearted that post, then sort of regretted it.
A text from Anjali asked what Mr. M’s message was about, and Eden wrote back, Don’t know. He never showed. Then fire alarm.
She wanted to say more; her fingers stayed poised there, but no, that wouldn’t be smart.
Do not tell anyone about the device.
Do not leave the device unattended.
Did that mean she had to take it into the bathroom with her?
She did, just to be safe. Her phone, too, so yes, she was sort of a hypocrite that way. She threw a towel over the device before unbuttoning her jeans. It was listening, so could it also be watching?
Eli texted, Everything okay?
She wrote back, So far, so good. It said not to get it wet. After I got it wet. But that’s it.
Okay keep me posted.
Back in her room she put the device on her desk and waited, phone in hand.
The AC cycled off, and the room felt eerily quiet. She always hated these in-between hours, before her mother was home safe and cooking and not out there where everything bad could happen. In the weeks after the accident, she’d been afraid to let her mother out of her sight, really. They’d long before deactivated the location services on their phones and the alerts that went along with them—“Eden arrived at home,” that sort of thing—but they’d reactivated them for a while right after. The few times she had been alone that week, Eden had tracked her mother’s location like a stalker and also watched the GoFundMe page total go up, wondering how long she could live on it if she ended up an orphan.
A shrieking bird flew by outside, announcing itself.
Two dogs on the sidewalk barked at each other.
Eden listened to that saved voice mail again: “Hey, I’m stopping at Trade Fair. Text me if you need anything.”
He’d never made it to the store, but his voice was so content, so oblivious to what was about to happen, that it soothed her. It seemed like most people lived their lives not anticipating all the horrible things that were about to happen. Her father had. She wished she could be more like him.
Red light drew her eye to the device.
THE DEVICE MUST CHANGE HANDS EVERY FOURTEEN HOURS OR FEWER.
Eden checked the time on her phone, did some math. They couldn’t exactly hand it off in the wee hours of the morning.
She texted Eli and took maybe her first full breath since she’d laid eyes on the thing. He’d come and get it, and she’d be free.
MARWAN
“You’re late.” Coach was at the elevator when Marwan stepped off.
“Won’t happen again.”
“Gear up,” Coach said, and Marwan ducked into the locker rooms and got ready as fast as he could.
He’d raced over on his bike—past the bodega and the halal meat cart and the international grocery store and the Dollar Tree. Past the bookshop and Irish bar and bakery and Colombian diner and wine shop and Dunkin’ and bagel shop and tiny Italian wine bar and cell phone store and vape shop. At one corner, he’d noted a Minnesota plate; at another, California. An old habit. Back when he was maybe ten he’d tried to find all fifty states, but he gave up after about a year when the last one just couldn’t be found. He’d seen Hawaii, even, but he’d still never spotted Alaska.
Checking his phone by his locker now, he had his first pangs of guilt and thought about trying to message Eden, but he didn’t have her number. He’d have to find her on Instagram or somewhere later just to make sure she’d put it back where they’d found it.
“Don’t even tell me you’re on your phone,” Max said on his way to the urinals. “Coach is waiting.”
Marwan slid his phone into his locker, closed and locked it.
Walking onto the indoor field, he knew he had to get out of New York City. People needed space. He wasn’t sure how much, exactly, but it was more than he had at home or here or even out on his bike. Maybe that was why he’d started the whole license plate quest all those years ago. It had helped him dream of spacious skies, majestic purple mountains, and fruited plains. Words like “Montana” and “Oregon” had always promised more.
Probably a lot of people who lived here felt the same about being all piled on top of each other. That was why they honked their horns the second after a light turned green in front of a car up there, or ran red lights (like with Eden’s dad), or fought over parking spots, and cursed at people on bikes.
Nobody had enough room.
She really shouldn’t have taken the device.
They should have left it alone, lied, and said they just hadn’t noticed it. Still, he felt bad about abandoning her with it and really hoped she had gone in and put it back. She seemed entirely too freaked out about it.
Why was he even still thinking about it?
About her?
He needed to focus. Coach was going to choose a goalie soon, and that was the position Marwan wanted and nee
ded. It was down to him and Max, really, and being an alternate was not an option Marwan could live with.
He ran out to meet Coach on the field. Around him, other players were doing various drills.
“Where do you want me?” Marwan asked.
“Far away on a soccer scholarship,” Coach said.
“I know.” Marwan nodded. “Me, too.”
“Can’t be a goalie without goals, Marwan.” An old joke of his.
“I know.”
“So are you gonna tell me why you were late?”
It was ridiculous to feel like he couldn’t mention the device. But it would sound more ridiculous to mention it. Marwan said, “I’m not sure I can tell you without lying, and I really don’t want to lie.”
“Try.”
“Something came up at school,” Marwan said.
Coach studied him for a second. “Midfield.” He nodded toward a cluster of guys practicing passing. “Go.”
They weren’t his favorite guys—not the guys he was usually partnered with—because they were lesser players, and he wondered if Coach was punishing him. Because why have him work with them?
That thought triggered another one, about Eden and Eli and Ilanka and the device. Why us?
EDEN
“Eden! I’m home!”
Eden paused the playlist called “Fables of the Reconstruction,” which she figured must be the songs her parents listened to when they’d done a big DIY renovation of the house when Eden was just a baby.
The device pulsed light, like it was waking up to listen.
Normally, Eden would head downstairs when her mother got home. They’d talk about their days—mostly just the surface stuff, like homework and work annoyances, sometimes a new book the publisher was acquiring—and maybe cook together. But the device’s rules were clear.
“Finishing up my homework!” Eden called out. “Down in a bit!”
“Oh-kay,” her mother said with a touch of confusion.
Eden only had to survive another hour before Eli came to take it. She just wanted to be done with it. She hadn’t liked babysitting the few times she’d done it, and this had started to feel like that—equal parts boring and too much responsibility.
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